right gang, if you're in my group you'll know about this, otherwise you won't.
so what makes Jerusalem so special, any comments please? who wants to take which bit of the fairly obvious geo-socio-eco-transporto-type facets of this wonderful discussion?
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right, looking into this, i think trying to do a "history" of jerusalem is going to be really difficult in 2 mins, if we've only got 10 mins to do geography, culture, transport, blah blah... From Wikipedia "In the course of its history, Jerusalem has been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times.[11]"
ReplyDeleteSo from a history perspective, think we have to go as superficial as possible and basically just say that as it's cultural and geographical location is so central for lots of different groups, its probably the most contested city in the world.
i can't remember the lecturers name, but she gave a quote yesterday, by Rousseau in the Social Contract, along the lines of "houses make a town, citizens make a city". With millions of different competing groups in the city, who's luck seems to go up and down over time, and a lot of them fucking hate each other, i was wondering if we could take the angle about whether these people DO actually share a sense of citizenship with other people who live there. What i mean is, do people who live there mainly put religion and race above the city they live in? Or is there a population (maybe secular?) who just seems themselves as "Jerusalemians", like Londoners or Mancunians, and who use THAT sense of identity as a reference point? Deep stuff for so early on a Saturday morning, but a cuppa tea and a boiled egg gets my brain going obviously.
One more thing before i go... If you take the Rousseau definition of a city as being defined by a united group of citizens, and we think that Jerusalem DOESN'T have that group, then does it actually qualify as a city?? Could be a slightly different slant for the presentation, if other people are going to talk for 10 mins about transport links and population density (yawn...)
take it easy y'all.